Philipp Brandt, Ph.D., HDR

Contact:

philipp.brandt [at] sciencespo.fr

Sciences Po

1 Place Saint-Thomas d'Aquin

75007 Paris

I am an Associate Professor of Sociology at Sciences Po, Paris, a chercheur at the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations (CSO), and the PI of the ReWORCS project, funded by an ERC Starting Grant. Previously, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Mannheim, Germany. I hold a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia University in New York City.

In my research, I develop computational approaches to study work trajectories and activities in emergent, precarious, and otherwise unstable settings. My substantive projects address a series of complementary questions, such as how experts define their role and identity in the digital era, how street-level bureaucrats operate in a hostile political setting, and how immigrant workers array jobs and gigs into careers outside of established paths. I use different established methods and techniques to address these issues but focus in particular on integrating ideas from qualitative research into analyses of large-scale behavioral records for making new sociological observations. This approach is geared toward capturing the micro-level unfolding of recent technological and economic changes, which I analyze in important and analytically productive cases: data science’s early formation, a US federal economic development agency, New York City taxi drivers, and work trajectories of immigrant workers in German firms. My findings inform a larger argument about non-standard work by revealing how workers leverage gaps between their work’s underlying social arrangements and overt appearances for distinct gains.

My CV is here.

BOOK:

Brandt, Philipp. (2026). Inside Data Science: Hackers and the Making of a New Profession. Columbia University Press.

ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS:

Watts, Duncan J. & Philipp Brandt (2026). Craft, Curiosity, and Knowledge. Sociologica, 20(2), 289-307.

Brandt, Philipp. (2025). Machine learning, abduction, and computational ethnography. In J.-P. Pardo-Guerra & C. Borch (Eds.) The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Machine Learning. Oxford University Press.

Brandt, Philipp. (2024). Data science's cultural construction: qualitative ideas for quantitative work. Frontiers in Big Data, 7, 1287442.

Brandt, Philipp. (2022). Sociology's Stake in Data Science. Sociologica, 16(2), 149-166.

Brandt, Philipp & Sean Safford. (2022). Globalization at the Crossroads of Organizational Strategies and National Institutions. In Borraz, O. (Ed.) La société des organisations. Sciences Po Press.

Brandt, Philipp & Stefan Timmermans. (2021). Abductive logic of inquiry for quantitative research in the digital age. Sociological Science, 8, 191-210.

Dorschel, Robert & Philipp Brandt. (2021). Professionalization via Ambiguity. The Discursive Construction of Data Scientists in Higher Education and the Labor Market. Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 50(3-4), 193-210.

Brandt, Philipp, Schrank, Andrew, & Josh Whitford. (2018). Brokerage and boots on the ground: Complements or substitutes in the manufacturing extension partnerships? Economic Development Quarterly, 32(4), 288-299.

Hoffman, Mark A., Cointet, Jean-Philippe., Brandt, Philipp, Key, Newton & Peter Bearman. (2018). The (Protestant) Bible, the (printed) sermon, and the word (s): The semantic structure of the Conformist and Dissenting Bible, 1660–1780. Poetics, 68, 89-103.

Brandt, Philipp & Josh Whitford. (2017). Fixing network failures? The contested case of the American Manufacturing Extension Partnership. Socio-Economic Review, 15(2), 331-357.